Friday, April 25, 2008

This was my daughter Magpie's response when I told her about our apartment building's gleaming new laundry room. The new laundry room, unlike the old one with its coin-operated machines, would take a slick, ultra-white re-fillable cash card instead.

And this means: we will no longer need to procure one-million-trillion quarters every time we need to do the laundry.

For us, finding the requisite quantity of quarters required for even the most humble amount of laundry meant hunting around the apartment for hours in the vain hope that a stray quarter might be stowed here or there, in a random drawer, hidden in an overfilled dish or perhaps forged from a forgotten corner of the floor.

This initial search was inevitably followed by raiding the piggy bank, the tzedakah box, and on one particularly bad day, even the state quarter map.